Friday, 8 January 2010

Not much time before landing, might as well say all this at last. A little wrath gave me a place to hide my face in, but when that passed and I looked in the eyes of those I'd left here to wander alone under the low ceiling of the empty sky, mercy measured the extent of my great openness, and I said: I won't say one more word; and I dashed my headset to the cockpit floor.Nothing mars the clarity of this calm desert night until I will it. There's a lot of cloud cover as we go down. The departure of the mountains and the removal of the hills may well ensue, but not the ending of this feeling of deep peace waiting at the end of the landing strip; into which, as on a ship drifting after being wrecked in a storm, one must belatedly and unexpectedly happen. I think I can make out the runway lights.

Have a safe flight, Stephen. But I worry: what will the channels do without their laureate? Is there such a thing as a channel flowing in a forest, with no one to hear it, and is it therefore still a channel, etc.?

On another perhaps relevant note -- after all we stretch relevance here much as the India rubber man stretches his appendages -- I hate to give away clues to the minimal obscurities that serve as the wobbly centres of my "texts" (ooh how precious that term has come to sound, unless of course you're in the "text" industry), but, in case it isn't really blindingly obvious, this post wasn't meant to be spoken by an airline pilot REALLY, no, the speaker was meant to be God.

Ahem!

(It's just a few moments ago been pointed out to me by a kind friend that two posts below I seem to have said I didn't believe in God, so this one amounts to an implicit denial and even a betrayal of my own atheism. Whether the result of short term memory failure or mere chronic vacillation, I suppose this does seem to be the case.)

Take-offs are so exciting! I refuse to have any logical or scientific explanation of how such a huge structure can be suspended in the air. I prefer the magic of it.Now touchdowns, whenever I am on a plane and it lands, a tear runs down my cheek. It is inevitable. Flying thrills me so much that I feel at peace once we are on solid ground again. It is the perfect finale for the adventure of flying.

Well, I think what it is is, we all have to make these concessions to our gods.

Of course those closure gods can be dangerous, like the gods of the Mayans and the Aztecs.

Once, when Ted was helpfully going through a bunch of my poems -- how else could he steal his friends' best lines, if he didn't studiously pore over all their new poems? (I remember he used to regularly sneak in and examine/pilfer Dick's when RG was out at work) -- he remarked that if they were his, he'd throw out all the last lines, so as to make the poems more mysterious.

Reconsidering this remark over the years has made me feel variously bad and good, depending on the occasion.

(And speaking of working in mysterious ways, while you were commenting here, guess where I was? In the afterlife? No. At Wordstrumpet? Yes.)

A DC-3 with one engine out, bouncing to a wobbly skid-stop on a golf course in Kent.

An SFO/Seattle flight that had to turn back because--message from the Captain--one wheel wouldn't budge from a half-retracted position, and the Captain said, Get ready to see some sparks, folks. And we did.

And that terrible "tight" (short) runway approach in San Diego, coming in from the East, yegads, the horror, more than once.

Don't really understand why one would be afraid in such circumstances, what a clean, quick exit it would be, sans the horrors of beeps and lights and intubation in the institutional sundown sector.

Probably just the creature deep inside saying, You shouldn't be in this metal tube up in the air.